It is also true in the case of domestic colonialism, like the Norwegian suppression of the language of Sami people, and variations of the same in other Scandinavian countries. The suppression of the languages of the dominated and the elevation of the language of conquest and domination were integral to the education system, which accompanied conquest and colonial occupation.
Language conquest, unlike the military form, wherein the victor must subdue the whole population directly, is cheaper and more effective: the conqueror has only to invest in capturing the minds of the elite, who will then spread submission to the rest of the population. The elite become part of the linguistic army of the conqueror.
The goal was very clear. Imperial educational policies were meant to create colonies of the mind, among the elite of the colonized. The success of these policies is undeniable. A variation of the Irish situation, where even after independence, the intellectuals express themselves more fluently in the language of imperial conquest than in the languages from their own country, is present in every post-colonial situation. In the case of Africa, you even hear the identity of the continent being described in terms of Europhonity: Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone, mainly. Even where the elite are nationalistic and assertive of their independence, they find it easier to express their outrage and hopes in the languages of imperial conquest. Ninety percent of the monies allocated for language education goes to pamper imperial languages. Ninety percent of the population still speaks African languages anyway. Some governments even view African languages as enemies of progress. They believe that imperial languages are really the gateway to global modernity.
Violence was central in creating the psychological bond of language, culture, and thought: colonies of the mind. You would think that after liberation and independence, the new nations, at the very least, would dismantle that unequal power relationship. But that is precisely the power of the colonies of the mind: negativity toward self has become internalized as a way of looking at reality.
It is a classic case of conditioning you will find in manuals of behavioral psychology. Conditioning is a system of reward and punishment, punishment for undesired behavior and reward for the desired behavior.
Here we need to make a distinction between education and knowledge. Knowledge is a question of continuously adding to what we already know in a dialectical play of mutual impact and illumination. The normal cognitive process starts from the known and heads toward the unknown. Every new step makes more of the unknown known and therefore adds to what is already known. The new known enriches the already known, and so on, in a continuous journey of making dialectically related connections. Knowledge of the world begins where one is.
Education, on the other hand, is a mode of conditioning people to make them fit into, and function in, a given society. It may involve transference of knowledge, but it is conditioned knowledge, branded by the world outlook of the educator and the education system.
Balanced and inclusive education calls for a new slogan: Network, not hierarchy. We have to understand that all languages, big and small, have a common language: it is called translation.
Education systems should never lead to linguistic and cultural self-isolation. I want to connect to the world, but I don’t have to negate my starting base first. I want to connect to the world from wherever I am. I believe that the goal of education is knowledge that empowers, that shows our real connections to the world, but from our base. From our base we explore the world: from the world we bring back that which enriches our base.
The process of knowing is quite simple. No matter where you want to journey, you start from where you are. If you are in Nairobi and you want to go to Nakuru, you don’t first go to Mombasa to start your journey to Nakuru. The same with knowledge our knowledge of the world and the universe begins with our bodies.
Imagination is the only human attribute that cannot as yet be replicated by technologies. And without imagination, there would be no science, no architecture, no technology, no invention, no innovation, among other things. Technology is first developed in imagination before it becomes a fact.
The aim was to make them question themselves, to destabilize their relationship to their own bodies and minds, to un-know what they were capable of doing. This literal depression of the conquered went together with the elevation of the mind and body of the conqueror. The outsiders depicted themselves as the owners of technology, invention, and innovation. They tried to convince the conquered Other that, without the conquerors’ technologies, there would be no production beyond foraging for fruit or hunting animals with their bare hands. I remember some teachers in my colonial school saying that Africa never invented the wheel.
Some of you may have come across relatives or neighbors who have lost their memory, through either senility or a traumatic experience. They simply cannot connect anything to anything. They don’t even remember their own children and relatives or their past interactions with them. They have no stable reference point. To a smaller or greater degree, an entire people can also suffer the collective loss of memory. I am sure there are members of the young generation who don’t believe that soldiers of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, otherwise known as the Mau Mau, made guns in their factories in the mountains.
Colonial education and related practices tried to induce collective amnesia about Africa, about its technology and innovation.
The language of a region holds the most effective and wide-ranging knowledge of the environment of that particular region. Destroy a people’s language, and you destroy the vocabulary by which they understood their environment, and consequently all the knowledge and information developed in the course of their interactions with that environment.
The language of the outsider becomes the language of power and normality. The vocabulary by which the conquering outsider looks at the conquered, their history, their productive capabilities, is that of the outsider. The colonial education system, enforced by the colonial language, was imbued through and through with the worldview of the outsider looking in. Those who went to the colonial school can remember lessons in geography and history that started with those of Europe.
The educated African may have consciously or unconsciously come to adopt the view of the outsider looking in. And in postcolonial Africa, the European language-educated elite has normalized the viewing of Africa from outside itself.
To put it simply, when you don’t feel you own a country, you probably won’t feel accountable for its state of affairs. People don’t normally rob themselves. Instead, they take care of their own property and try to ensure its protection. Corruption is stealing from the people of Kenya and all Africa, and it is driven by the mentality of the outsider looking in. This was the main theme in my novel Devil on the Cross, which I wrote in Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison in 1978. In the novel, I depicted a competition organized by the devil to choose the seven cleverest robbers. But these are no ordinary robbers: to qualify for the competition, one must demonstrate that one has robbed millions or billions from the people. These are world-class thieves. They testify to their past heroic plundering, but they also articulate a vision of future theft. The winner will be crowned Chief of Robbers by the Organization for Modern Theft and Robbery, then headquartered in New York. I would recommend the book to all those who desire a resurgent Africa.
In West Africa they call him a griot. Swahili civilization is replete with poets, leaders of thought spanning centuries. A book edited by Abdilatif Abdalla and published by Mkuki na Nyota, Kale ya Washairi wa Pemba (The Past of Pemba Poets), lists quite a few, including Fumo Liyongo wa Baury in the twelfth century, and Suudbin Said Al-Maamiriy in the nineteenth century. These poet-intellectuals largely saw themselves as the voices of the people and seekers of justice.
Language has always been a battlefield of ideas. It is a war zone in the struggle between enslavement and empowerment, between the dominated and the dominating, the colonized and the colonizing. The history of a language, Tom Paulin has written, is often a story of possession and dispossession, territorial struggle, and the establishment or imposition of a culture. Language has been as much the tool of conquest and resistance as the sword. Indeed some of the fiercest battles have been fought and continue to be fought in this zone.
The African continent continues to suffer the consequences of linguistic conquest. Political independence may have freed the body, but it certainly did not free the mind. This is the long-term effect of linguistic domination.
The result for Africa is a gigantic disconnect between the educated middle class and the general population, which was always the intention of the colonial enterprise. If you think of languages in terms of war, it was as if the African generals became captives in the enemies’ camp. By generals, I don’t just mean government alone.
All this calls for a grand alliance of scholars, academies, publishers, and educational policymakers. Intellectuals inside and outside Africa must lead: they have to live up to their venerable tradition. The intellectual in all cultures and histories has been a pathfinder, and in all cultures, these intellectuals have had to pay a price, not too big a price, but a price all the same: prison, exile even. The intellectuals of our times must not run away from the fight, from the zones of war.
Language is a product of a community in its economic, political, and cultural evolution in time and space. In their very negotiation with nature and with one another, humans give birth to a system of communication whose highest expression and development is the organized sound that we call language. But language is also the producer of a community, for it is language, after all, that enables humans to negotiate effectively their way into and out of nature and that makes our multifaceted evolution possible. It is in that very negotiation with nature that a community comes to know itself as a specific community different from others.
In his Science of Logic and Phenomenology of the Spirit, as indeed in all his works, Hegel often talks of being and becoming, making the distinction between Being in itself and Being for itself, notions that Jean-Paul Sartre plays with in Being and Nothingness, further talking about Being for others. We can think of being in itself as when an entity exists objectively undifferentiated, as opposed to being for itself when it becomes aware of itself as an entity. Language is what most helps in the movement of a community from a state of being in itself to a state of being for itself, and this self-awareness is what gives the community its spiritual strength to keep on reproducing its being as it continually renews itself in culture, in its power relations, and in its negotiations with its entire environment. It is its culture that enables a community to imagine and reimagine itself in history.
Culture is to a community what a flower is to a plant. A flower is very beautiful, very colorful, often very delicate, but it often readily defines the identity of the plant. Most important, the flower yields the seeds that make reproduction of the roots and trunks of that plant possible. Kill the tree trunk and even the roots, but retain the seeds, and the tree can reproduce itself. It can, if you like, reimagine itself. Language, the carrier of culture, is the ultimate and primary means of individual and collective self-imagination.
In the famous 1963 essay “The Novelist as a Teacher,” Achebe wrote, “If I were God, I would regard as the very worst our acceptance, for whatever reason, of racial inferiority.” He went on to define his role as a writer as that of an educator trying to help “my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-denigration.”
I was attracted to move by the idea of the International Center for Writing and Translation (ICWT), but that was not how I answered my concerned questioners. My response was simple and always the same: “I am going to UCI, the center of the world.” By that I meant no more than the fact that in a world like ours, every point on its surface is a center of the whole. The challenge is for the inhabitants of a specific point to see the links that bind them to all the other points. Every center should reflect the globe as much as the globe should reflect them. William Blake put it better when he challenged his readers to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.
This involves asking questions that may never have been asked, climbing heights that have never been climbed, dreaming that which has not been dreamed, daring our minds to soar, unfettered.
No university should be proud of monoculturalism or monolingualism. Building bridges between even apparently irreconcilable viewpoints is an important function of the university. Just as ecological diversity is important for a healthy and robust social life. In fact, cultural diversity is not an addendum to the intellectual life of a university; it is an essential. I believe it was Plato’s most famous pupil, Aristotle, one of the earliest academicians of Ancient Greece, who once wrote that while each one of us can know only a part of the truth, the union of many can illuminate a greater area of truth. An approximation of truth, of course, never the final truth. Given its very intellectual constitution and mission of truth and excellence, the university should strive for the aesthetic of a multicolored garden.
The modern university should be the great refueling center for that oxygen. Perhaps Aimé Césaire put it even better in his great poem Return to My Native Land, where he wrote that:
. . . it is not true that the work of man is finished,
That man has nothing more to do in the world
But be a parasite in the world
That all we now need is to keep in step with the world
But the work of man is only just beginning
And it remains to man to conquer all of the violence embedded in the recesses of his passionAnd no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of freedom
There is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.
The poems remind us of the obvious: that Abdilatif Abdalla is primarily a poet and not a politician; and that his real voice, the enduring voice, the voice that will survive him, is the one infused with the spirit of the words, rhythms, and imagery of his poetry, reminding us of the Keatsian words “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” At its best and most powerful, the aesthetic is also the ethical.
Linguistic feudalism should be replaced by the concept of network, in which languages and cultures large and small give and take without exploitation or oppression. Such a network assumes the equality of languages.
As a human being, he embodied wisdom that comes from a commitment to the middle way between extremes.
Fortunately, we have her words for how it felt: “Being at the school was like facing a monster. I felt angry, upset, and alone.” Mĩcere rose to the occasion and the demands of the time by excelling in everything, from sports, such as hockey, netball, tennis, and athletics, to debate and academics.
In her own words, “I told myself I had to be the best at everything I did.” She had to do it all under scrutiny, for herself, her family, her nation, her race. It was almost as if she was there to prove our worth for independence. She was only one person, but for Kenyans, she was the One!
That academic feat would later inspire many more PhDs, particularly by women. I have personally met two female Kenyan PhD holders who have told me how crucial the academic achievements of Mĩcere were in their own conceptions of their abilities and ambitions. She was the first woman Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nairobi.
A dictatorship is ruled through a culture of silence and fear, and the Moi dictatorship was no different.
In a way, the seeds of the dictatorship had been planted earlier in the regime of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of the newly independent Kenya. He had been a valiant Pan Africanist anticolonial leader, and had been imprisoned by the British for eight years. He had been falsely accused of managing the Mau Mau uprising, which had been led by Dedan Kĩmathi. Following the pattern of his friend and comrade in Pan-Africanism Kwame Nkrumah, who left prison to become prime minister of Ghana, Kenyatta also graduated from prison to presidency in 1963.
The situation— and this was the case not just in Kenya but throughout postcolonial Africa— is that described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, wherein the global vision that guided the anticolonial struggle gradually shrinks to the level of the continent, then the national territory, then down to the regional and ethnic level. The symbols of the nation left standing are the flag, the anthem, the nationalized colonial army and police force, and of course the Leader.
A country could transition from the colonial to the neocolonial. Neocolonialism is a system in which a country could sing a national anthem, raise a national flag, and still have its economy and politics and even culture controlled from the outside. Imperialism has a colonial and neocolonial phase. The struggle for independence freed us from the colonial phase. We had independence but not necessarily national liberation and social revolution. We may not have put it in those exact terms, but they sum up the shared ideological perimeters that bound us and our talks.
If you ever expected to see Mĩcere bow down in sorrow or self-pity, then you don’t know the girl who once had to shoulder the whole of Kenya as the only African person in an all-white school. Mĩcere Mũgo is a fighter. Where there is a fight for human rights, she is there. In Canada, as a student, she was part of the Angela Davis campaign, and whenever I have met Angela, she always had a few kind words about Mĩcere. Unfortunately, she has also had to battle with cancer and the loss of her beloved daughter Njeri, but she still walks tall, still smiles, and still retains a great sense of humor.
The concept permeates her work, as you can see in her collection of essays Writing from the Heart of My Mind. It permeates her poetry and her plays.
Dear Nadine, Your Name Is Hope.
You were born on the wealthy side of the color divide.
You built bridges across the divide.
Even when Apartheid destroyed or burnt them down with hatred,
You went back at it with pen, courage, and hope.
Dear Nadine, Your Name Is Hope.
You found the crying; you wiped their tears.
Those without food, you shared what you had kept aside.
Those who were thirsty, you shared the water you carried.
The tortured, you uplifted them with words of hope.
Dear Nadine, Your Name Is Hope
What then remains to say?
You found broken hearts.
You put them back together with words
From a team that flowed ink instead of blood.
Dear Nadine, Your Name Is Hope.
Even though you are now with Mandela and others,
Even though we don’t see you with our earthbound eyes,
We have inherited hope from your words
That you have spun these ninety years.
In reality, I met a lean, dark-suited gentleman, whose height dwarfed mine. Was he going to talk about his prison days? Ask me about Kenyan politics? Or simply voice his dreams for a South Africa whose leadership he would soon assume? He didn’t ask about any of these things. He talked mostly about books: what African writers had meant to him and his fellow political prisoners, and how books had played a role in buoying their spirits. Books, books, and more books. I felt as if through me he was talking to all writers of the world.
The two incidents brought home to me the meaning of Mandela’s introspective tone. The country was literally on the verge of a bloodbath, and he knew it. He held the key to its stability. Despite his calm demeanor, this must have weighed on him.
He held the nation together for the five years that he was president, guided by the realization that there is no room for vengeance in good politics. It is easier to tear down than to build up. In his one term, he showed his faith in the ANC and the people.
He reminisced about Biko, paying tribute to the role of the Black Consciousness Movement and indeed the role of other political parties in the liberation, mentioning Robert Sobukwe by name. Again, he was so generous in his inclusiveness. The question of his giving the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture came up, and indeed he gave the lecture the following year.
Even those who then called him a terrorist
Now acclaim him a freedom fighter.
Those who once wanted him gone
Are now shedding tears that he’s gone.
It is said that truth never dies.
It cannot be buried in a hole.
They tried to kill it with bullets.
They wondered, how did it escape?
They put it in chains.
They sent it to Rob’em Island.
They made it break stones twenty seven years.
They tortured it to make truth give up hope.
They tried all to make truth surrender to lies.
They did not realize it was the body breaking stones,
That truth cut through the handcuffs and barbed wire long ago,
That it was truth that guided the armed struggle,
Singing that which had been sung by other seekers of freedom.
You can send us to exile and prisons
Or confine us to islands,
But we shall never stop struggling for freedom. . . .
Mandela Madiba Rolihlahla of Thembu and African clan,
Your body that has gone to rest under the shades of holy peace.
The truth they tried to shoot down with bullets,
The truth they put in hand and leg chains,
The truth for which they put you in jail and detention—
That truth lives on among the people for ever
In the hearts of all fighters for truth and justice the world over.
Nine days earlier, when F.W. de Klerk announced that Mandela would be free, a nine-year-old girl I know greeted the news by jumping up and down and urging her mother, “Please, let's make a big card and send it to Mandela. It’s say, ‘Welcome home, Baba Mandela!’” The girl and her mother lived in Newark, and in 1963, when Mandela had been jailed for life, the mother Kenyan had been only a baby. Quite clearly, Mandela is in the minds and hearts of several generations— all of whom value human freedom— in Africa and the world.
The most compelling thing about Mandela is how he endured those years of solitary confinement and other torture without ever surrendering to the racist vampires. In him people see the infinite capacity of the human spirit to resist and to conquer. Do we not for the same reason identify in literature with characters like Prometheus? And in history with people like Paul Robeson, Kwame Nkrumah, Ho Chi Minh, Nat Turner, Toussaint Louverture, Kenyan freedom fighter Dedan Kĩmathi, Zimbabwean resistance leader Mbuya Nehanda, and martyred Chilean poet and singer Víctor Jara?
All these figures are heroic because they reflect more intensely in their individual souls the souls of their community. Their uniqueness is the uniqueness of the historical moment. They make history even as history makes them. They are torches that blaze new paths. Each torch has been lit by the fire of the masses, and every time the flame seems to fade, the great ones turn to their people for more energy.
Mandela has been such a torch for the South African people. The people of South Africa are reflected in Mandela.
In Mandela, people around the world have been applauding the courage, the endurance, the resistance, and the spirit of the South African masses. People around the world, particularly Africans and those of African descent outside Africa have seen themselves reflected in the struggling South African masses. Or put another way, Mandela is to black South Africa’s struggles what black South Africa’s struggles are to the democratic forces of the world in the twentieth century. Indeed, South Africa is a mirror of the modern world in its emergence over the last four hundred years.
South Africa also became the knot that tied together the diverse histories and fortunes of Asia, Europe, and the United States. Like the rest of the continent, South Africa saw her people hunted down and carried away like slaves. Their labour was used to develop what later became the United States, and profits from the sale of their bodies as commodities became part of the capital that figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Eric Williams have proved was the basis of Western Europe’s nineteenth-century industrial revolution
From 1652, when first Dutch and French settlers, then British settlers streamed into South Africa and began forcibly taking land from the Africans, to the nineteenth century when the whole country became first a British colony and then a crinoline supervised by a white minority, the gold, diamonds, and mineral resources of South Africa were used to develop Western European industries— and later U.S. industry, too— and to build enormous gold reserves. Is there any bank, financial institution, or industry of any significant size in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan that is not indebted to the gold and diamonds of South Africa?
The majority of the industries inside South Africa are branches, subsidiaries, or partners of those in the West and their enormous profits are clearly rooted in the slave wages of black workers and in the poverty of the majority guaranteed by the cruel system of apartheid. The South African economy is still inextricably tied to that of the West, so it is unsurprising that even now Britain and the United States are hostile to calls for economic boycotts to motivate South African government and institutions to undo the legacy of apartheid in the country’s continued social inequality and Black poverty.
In the South African system, people see the bitter fruition of at least five forces that have bedeviled the development of human beings: classical colonialism, neocolonialism, slave wages, racism, and the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty through the denial of democracy.
But Black South Africans are not endlessly helpless victims of superior forces. Their history presents a people who have been pioneers in the struggle for communal survival, national liberation, and social emancipation. The ferocity of Black South African resistance blunted the determined efforts of European settlers to annihilate them.
Racial oppression carries within it many forms of denial— economic, political, cultural, and psychological. Who does not see themselves reflected in the mirror?
South Africa is me. South Africa is you. South Africa is all the black people of the Earth. South Africa is all the workers of the world. South Africa is all of humanity in its struggles to save itself. If that struggle for the recovery of a sense of human community is led by South Africa’s masses through their political organizations, like the South African Communist Party, and the Pan-African Congress, it is equally true that Nelson Mandela has been its leading symbol.
Whether they achieve that kind of empowerment or not will depend on the extent to which they can resist being pressured by the West to accept the Kenya solution. In 1962, Jomo Kenyatta was released from eight years in prison, and he proceeded to negotiate away everything that the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (the Mau Mau) had fought for. Colonial structures were left intact, and Kenya under Daniel arap Moi became one of the most repressive states in the world, a neocolony completely and pathetically dependent on the West. Kenyatta lost on the negotiating table what had already been won on the battlefield by the Kenyan people.
Black South Africa cannot accept, or indeed afford, to replace the 1910 neocolonial arrangement run by a white minority with a perpetual neocolonial arrangement run by a Black Minority. The history of the last four hundred years calls upon them to overthrow the triple burdens of colonialism, neocolonialism, and racial oppression and to start on a sentient march toward justice for all.
In the novel, I had played with the idea that it was not Christ who should have been executed on the cross but the Devil himself. Jesus was an opponent of Roman imperialism, a proponent of the least among us, a visionary who saw the poor, among which he walked, as inheriting the earth. The Devil was an ally of Roman imperialism and its oppressive practices, a self-serving criminal whose followers, exploiters of the poor, have as much chance of entering heaven as a camel through the eye of a needle.
The first act and indeed the signal victory of colonial capitalism was the destruction of the African artisan class. These were the workers in iron, copper, and gold. These artisans made things with the raw materials around them. They made jewelry: copper rings to decorate legs, arms, and necks, as well as earrings. They were the minds and hands behind the defense industry, making spears, arrowheads, and swords. They made cooking utensils. Their tools sustained the textile industry, making clothes out of leather and the bark of trees.
You build on tradition; you do not destroy it, as did colonial capitalism to African genius and self-belief.
In short, colonialism disabled the class that used to make things for use and exchange from the raw materials around them. Colonial domination killed that tradition of invention and manufacture. The newcomers coerced the export of raw materials to their home countries, where their own artisan class made things out of these same raw materials.
An excellent student of South African literary and intellectual history, Mphahelele was aware of the words of R.V. Selope Thema in an issue of the Chamber of Mines weekly newspaper for workers, Umteteli wa Bantu (Mouthpiece of the People), in March 1929:
The duty of Bantu writers and journalists, as that of writers and journalists of other races, is to call the attention of the leaders to the things that are detrimental to the interest and welfare of our people. A writer who does not criticize and correct the mistakes of his people does not fulfill the purpose for which God endowed him with the power of the pen. A writer is a prophet, and his duty is not only to prophesy but also to rebuke, when necessary, the people for wrongdoing; to criticize, when occasion demands it, the conduct and methods of the leaders of his race, and point out the way of salvation.
This is still true in contemporary times. Writers have to be the voice of the voiceless. They have to give voice to silence, especially the silence imposed on a people by an oppressive state. The South African writer has played this role bravely and magnificently in the past, from Krune Mqhayi to Breyten Breytenbach. For their words alone, some of them have faced torture, exile, and death. Indeed, there were times when the South African writer, at home or in exile, was the most eloquent voice of the silenced. Some writers chose to engage in the very struggle they talked about in their books.
What, then, is the real role of the artist and the arts in society? It is the part that the arts play in the very survival of the human. The human body needs food, water, and air. But human beings have an ethical dimension to their being. Humans don’t live to eat but eat to live. Humans make choices, moral and aesthetic, that create and cater to the spiritual dimension to their being. Many ethical systems in the form of religions and other ritual practices try to reflect and cater to this spirituality, to nourish the soul in the same way food nourishes the body. The body and the mind are essential to human existence.
However, there is one realm of being without which there would be no difference between humans and the rest of nature. I am talking of the imagination. Imagination is central to the survival of humans as humans. Architects must picture a building in their minds before they can build it. Without imagination, there would be no religions. We imagine God and Satan as embodiments of the oppositional ideals of good and evil. Worship and ceremony would be impossible without imagination. Humans can imagine journeys before they set out on them. Humans can imagine the past and the future. We can imagine different futures, endless different possibilities, and then make choices based on what we imagine. This capacity to imagine a different future is important in order to resist succumbing to apparently impossible situations. We have seen how an oppressive social system, or rulers in general, try to limit our imagination, to make people unable to imagine and therefore unable to struggle for a different future. That we have arrived at the best of all possible worlds is the constant refrain of the dominant social forces in society. Without imagination, there would be no songs, poetry, fiction, and prophecy.
Let us look at the three central constituents of a human being: the body, the soul, and the imagination. Humans make sure that they do not starve the body. They nourish it with enough healthy food where possible. Otherwise, the body shrivels, becomes weak. The same with spirituality. Humans nourish it with good ethical practices that ensure that they make good ethical choices and hold on to values that enhance their individual and collective lives. Religions, in the widest possible dimension of the term, cater to the spiritual to ensure that the “soul” does not shrivel because of bad advice, choices, and practices.
The primary role of the writer, or more broadly the artist, is to produce the healthiest material for the education of the imagination. Just as unhealthy food weakens the body and bad ethical choices diminish the spiritual, so also bad art can limit the imagination or direct it to unhealthy ends. That’s why the arts should not be a luxury in the school system. They should be central to it. Even engineers, architects, urban planners, teachers, and scientists thrive on a robust imagination that can find links between phenomena.